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Ample warning

The United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (CIO/DPRK) held a public hearing at Johns Hopkins SAIS in Washington, DC October 30-31. Established in March, the CIO/DPRK has since convened in Seoul, Tokyo, and London to receive testimony from first-hand witnesses and experts. The Commission is mandated to present findings and recommendations to the UN Human Rights Council in March 2014.

Chairperson Michael Kirby, former Justice of the High Court of Australia, and Sonja Biserko, founder and president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, led this hearing.

Kirby recently told the BBC that despite his 35 years of experience as a judge listening to cases “which somewhat harden one’s heart,” testimonies heard by the CIO have brought him to tears.

There were tears in the room on last Wednesday as the Commission collected anecdotal evidence from two witnesses who have defected from the DPRK. Twenty-five-year-old Jin Hye Jo recounted the deaths by starvation of her grandmother and two younger brothers, the trafficking of her older sister, and the alleged extrajudicial execution of her father by security forces. Because her father was born in China, her family was suspect in the eyes of the state.  This placed them firmly in the “wavering class,” the middle rungs of North Korea’s elaborately hierarchical caste system known as songbun.  Her father therefore had no choice but to work for low pay in the mines, and her family went chronically hungry while government leaders were driving BMWs and drinking high-end whiskey. Jin crossed into China four times—and was repatriated four times, enduring imprisonment and torture “almost to death”—before finally obtaining the protection of the UNHCR in Beijing on her fifth attempt in 2006.  She, her mother and her younger sister have settled in the US. Read more